Exactly. The surgeon general tweeted out, “STOP WEARING MASKS” and CNN was publishing articles with all the anti-masker claims, including that they don’t work and could increase your risk of getting it instead, and people just pretend like it never happened and the anti-maskers came out of thin air.

It wasn’t just an idiotic ploy to deliberately spread misinfo to trick people into leaving masks for doctors, it was also about the government trying to cover their own ass for having sold off their emergency stockpiles for fast cash.

Fahrenheit is the temperature brine feels.

“Gender is what’s in your pants” alright then my gender is death

As the only real leftist on this site, I will be travelling to each state just so I can commit voter fraud in each one and write in “Karl Stalin.”

Because no fighting was happening in Ukraine before the Russians entered the country, right? The war just fell out of a coconut tree?

I don’t immediately remember any particurarily good (liberal, free, non-oppressive, democratic) nations that NATO poses a risk to, however. Perhaps you can refresh my memory.

Liberal, free, non-oppreasive, democratic nations that oppose Western neocolonial interests tend to get coup’ed by the CIA and replaced with pro-Western fascists. Countries that do survive, like for instance Cuba, have their name dragged through the mud by an enormous propaganda machine - which also whitewashes or conveniently forgets the crushing of the leftist projects that don’t survive.

There are countless examples throughout history, but my go-to is Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, in the 50’s. No doubt the line will be that “that was a long time ago so it doesn’t count,” but the CIA covered up their involvement for decades, and if I picked a more modern example you’d likely either deny involvement or say that the government deserved it.

Iran suffered under British colonialism for decades. In the 1800’s, the shahs signed all sorts of deals selling out the country at absurdly bad rates and no expiration, to fund their exorbitant lifestyles. A large scale popular movement ousted them, but the agreements remained, and a new dynasty took power with British support, and the exploitation continued. Britain secured enormous profit and wealth through Iranian oil while falsifying records to pay virtually nothing for it while the Iranians lived in abject poverty. For decades the Iranians sought a diplomatic resolution and we’re completely stonewalled.

Finally, another popular movement caused the shah to appoint Mossadegh as PM (a position that had previously been hand-picked by the British). Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry to enormous popular support, but the British responded with a blockade, and offered Eisenhower support in Korea and in forming NATO in exchange for having the CIA oust Mossadegh (an offer Truman had dismissed in disgust, as this was the first case of CIA involvement of regime change).

Mossadegh, like many Iranians at the time, saw their struggle as being only against the British and trusted the US to uphold the values it preached and saw it as a potential friend. The CIA took over every newspaper in the country and started publishing anti-government propaganda nonstop. They hired false flag protesters, who claimed to support the government and then wrecked shit (as well as hiring protesters to march against the government). Politicians, vote counters, religious leaders, journalists, anyone with an ounce of power was getting bribed by the CIA. Mossadegh believed that these were genuine and legitimate expressions of dissent and did nothing to crack down. Finally, a US diplomat told him a made-up sob story about people at the embassy getting death threats from his supporters and threatened to close it, and Mossadegh got on the radio and told his supporters to stand down and stay home - the next day, the CIA launched a coup that ousted him from power.

What followed was the restoration of the shah’s power, which included hunting down leftists with secret police, banning traditional religious garb to make the country appear more Western, and of course the continued exploitation of Iranian oil, the proceeds of which went straight to the king’s bank account. When the Iranian Revolution of 1973 happened, decade of political repression of the left allowed the Islamic fundamentalists to be the ones that took power, and the US allowed the shah to flee there which outraged the Iranians, considering that he had previously been installed by them.

I could tell you the same story over and over again about countries all around the globe. Many nations had resources stolen from them via violence and colonialism and these resources remain in the hands of the people who took them, and anyone who attempts to reassert control over their own resources is putting themselves in the crosshairs of the the US and NATO, whether through sanctions, seizing assets, CIA backed coups, or overt military aggression. But all they have to do is cover up the truth or present a bullshit justification, and by the time it falls apart it’ll be too late to do anything about it, it’ll have faded from the public consciousness, and people will assert, without reason or evidence, that “they don’t do that anymore” dispite having clear means and motive to and never having faced any sort of punishment for it. Meanwhile the historical examples can continue to be used to intimidate countries outside of the imperial core who don’t have goldfish memories, and understand that they could be next. So they either comply with neocolonial exploitation, or they take measures to prevent CIA infiltration, which then gets them derided as “authoritarian” by people like you - and if they do neither of these things, then they get coup’ed and replaced by a fascist.

My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started “self-medicating” with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he’d see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn’t and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she’s in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he’d accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he’d accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.

My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he’d check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.

It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody’s house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn’t know if he’d live or die and didn’t care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he’s doing better now.

What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that’s when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother’s face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?

And it’s all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn’t even happening. People don’t even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can’t get care, they sure as shit don’t care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It’s absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.

I suppose time will tell whether that trend will grow to the point of being really significant. I don’t really trust the state as it stands to regulate speech in my interests. I do still believe in deplatforming hate speech when possible, and I don’t really see the marketplace of ideas as being reliable due to certain ideas having stronger signals, either from monetary backing or grabbing attention. As things stand though, I don’t really have a better answer than just personally using the fediverse over big social media sites.

Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.

The other question I have is:

What we need to do is take away the power social media companies have to influence the types and quantity of information we receive.

Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?

I agree with you in part, but:

Societies which stifle dissent, especially using the power of the state, grow weaker because they aren’t able to effectively adapt to change. Remember it is not too long ago that advocating for gay marriage would have been seen as morally deviant and repugnant. But strong speech protections allow us as a society to have that discussion and come to the correct conclusion which is that it’s fine to be gay, that love is love, and that gay people deserve equal protection under the law.

Free speech is also allowing a massive, astroturfed campaign to spread transphobia. The people with the most money have the loudest voices, and printing sensationalist bigotry to provoke fear, anger, and hate gets the clicks which makes more money.

What makes it especially terrifying, and I’m speaking from personal experience, is that you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen. Most people in the target audience will just get a little pissy and keep clicking headlines (and voting to take away rights), but there’s also people who are unstable, whether due to drugs or psychological issues or simply being too deep into the narrative. When you have for example far-right media outlets saying trans people are pedophiles, and more mainstream sources validating that perspective in not so many words, and that’s being broadcast to some meth head watching hours on end every day, then I’m not really a fan of that speech being free.

Just last weekend, for instance, some queer friends and I were threatened by an unstable person with a metal pipe just walking down the street, idk how much the media plays into that but I also had a family member who did what I described above, shooting up meth and watching shit like OAN all day every day. And even regular people who watch too much cable news, and it doesn’t even matter that much what they watch, if you try to reason with them, no matter how much sense you make or what facts you have on your side, it’s one conversation vs all the time they’ve spent watching the news - I like to compare it to trying to win an argument when the other side gets to say 100 words (or more) every time you say 1. In this way, good ideas don’t always win in the marketplace of ideas.

But yeah I agree with your overall point, sanctioning someone for interviewing a world leader is some bullshit, fuck Tucker Carlson but it’s always important to understand rival geopolitical powers.

You should either stop doing that or get better takes then lol.

All these people are very upset, I’m just over here, cool as as a cucumber, holding my turd, rational, reasonable, calm

Can’t believe ISIS would do something like that 😔

I’ve been watching Voyager for the first time and just got to the episode. I think I agree with the decision (as a lever-puller) but it does raise some interesting questions. As Janeway mentions, if they’d been able to do it immediately, she’d have done it without question, but after two weeks of Tuvix integrating with the crew it’s a more difficult question. If Tuvix had been around for say 5 years I think I’d disagree with separating him. I think the way I look at it is that the social bonds possessed by Tuvok and Neelix are more important than the mere two week old bonds of Tuvix, but if Tuvok and Neelix were long dead and their loved ones had already mourned them, while Tuvix had had more time to become a fixture in people’s lives, then the circumstances would be different. Tbh I disagree with the idea that Tuvok and Neelix get the biggest say - I think that the input of Kes and the rest of the crew is valuable, and Kes pleads to get Neelix back while none of the crew back Tuvix.

Does that mean the worth of lives is based on popularity? Not generally, but I do think that social connections are a relevant thing to consider. Part of what makes murder bad is not just the loss of the individual’s life, but also what it means for everyone else. If you could press a button to create a life then press another to end it, would you have made the world a worse place by doing so? I don’t think so. But if you press a button to create a life then go out and murder someone who already existed, then I think you have.

I’d also say that the captain’s responsibilities in her role as captain are relevant and also support the decision.

Food has a cultural component tied to its manufacture and identification. And IPAs are food that probably shouldn’t exist and which only does as a byproduct of market capitalism. They’re the Lacanian ‘object a’ - an empty, manufactured falseness. We don’t desire the thing itself, but the thing whose absence it symbolizes. What you’re really consuming when you drink an IPA is its innate mechanical predictability.

(Thanks to the thread last week arguing about pumpkin spice lattes for giving me a new copypasta to use about anything I personally dislike.)

Boss Battle music

Always fun to see accusations with no link and speculate on what actually happened.

I was raised Catholic and left it at a young age and spent a lot of time uprooting the brainworms so I don’t think there’s much left. However, whenever I can’t find something I really need and start getting stressed, I’ll still recite, “Dear St. Anthony, please come around, my X has been lost and cannot be found.” It’s a useful way to calm down and focus instead of freaking out and panicking.

Other than that, I still retain a lot of the theology I learned in high school, and I can still sometimes get a little opinionated about various things even though I have no dog in the fight.

Well, some of those are actual bigots and some of them are false positives

Years ago I tried my hand gambling on politics on PredictIt, and I didn’t lose all that much, but there were a couple bets I lost that seemed like sure things. Mostly the lesson I learned is that talk is cheap and there’s no real consequences for people saying one thing and doing the other.

For example, in the 2016 election, there was a market on whether no-name Carly Fiona would qualify for the CNN debate, and by the rules they set she didn’t qualify, but there hadn’t been as many polls in the right timeframe as had been expected. Still, they released a statement days before the debate, saying “rules are rules,” so I took a bet at like 90% odds thinking it was completely safe - then they let her in at the last minute and I lost big. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I think I lost a fair bit on a market about Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un, which was a pretty chaotic market. The most chaotic market I ever saw, which I avoided and wanted no part of, was whether Bernie would win Iowa in 2020, and watching it closely in real time made it very obvious that some really shady stuff was going on. Probably the most I ever lost was Biden winning the 2020 primary, which is about when I got out of it.

I would not recommend gambling like that because if you have money on the line there’s an incentive to be glued to the news in a way that can be really unhealthy. Honestly the stress was worse than the money I lost. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, the fees will get you, also it’s generally more about predicting what the market will think so you can profit off the swings, and personally I think it’s kind of a distasteful way to engage in politics. At the same time, it can be a learning experience - it definitely got me in the habit of asking “And what consequences will this person face if they’re lying off their ass?” every time I see a headline about someone saying something, and of not paying as much attention to statements in general.